Abstract
This study explores Anne Michaels’s representation of the Second World War – with particular reference to the Holocaust – in her novel Fugitive Pieces. The study contends that Michaels demonstrates a way of remembering these traumatic and debilitating events which not only promotes physical, emotional and spiritual recuperation but is also capable of beneficially affecting the future.
The first chapter contextualises the study by describing the literary debate that surrounds Holocaust representation in writing, a debate which furthermore entails an argument on the efficacy of literary techniques such as the use of metaphor. In the chapter, it is proposed that the novel ‘speaks out’ against silence, and privileges remembrance over disregard. The second chapter suggests that the novel is an example of the way in which metaphor can be used effectively to figure the Holocaust for survivors and victims, and for subsequent generations. Concomitantly, the chapter defends Michaels’s use of metaphor in its presentation of proposals, concerning her characters and their experience of the Holocaust, that display rare perspicacity and benevolence. The third and final chapter of this study comprises a four-section exploration of specific metaphors which the author uses in Fugitive Pieces to demonstrate that the horror characterising the Holocaust should not be the sum total of its effect, and that affirmations such as faith and hope can and did arise in the context of extreme physical and mental distress.
This thesis is based on the proposition that Michaels’s layering of real-life testimony with imaginative intuition introduces her readers to a valuable way of dealing with the past and facing the future.